Harvard International Conference on Internet & Society 2000

Andrew S. Grove
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
June 2, 2000

ANNOUNCER: Dr. Grove, an early founder of Intel, and its past president, CEO, and current chairman of the board, does not need, really, an introduction.

I would like just to highlight a few things. One is that he's a prolific writer. He has written numerous articles, different publications, and many books, and his most recent book is "Only the Paranoid Survive."

Dr. Grove was elected to be the Person of the Year by Time Magazine in 1997.

Dr. Grove actually emphasizes what is the subject of our conference. Intel and Dr. Grove have changed our lives by giving us faster, cheaper, and more powerful computers, faster again and more powerful and cheaper, and faster and cheaper, for the last 20 years. And that has changed our lives.

Dean Clark is the dean of the business school and has made information technology a keystone in his strategy and his leadership at the business school; information technology, both as a subject matter and as a tool to deliver the pedagogy at the business school.

Dr. Grove and Dean Clark.

(Applause.)

ANDREW GROVE: Good afternoon, and let me give you an apology in advance. Having participated in three classes this morning, I'm on the ragged edge of my voice. So if suddenly I burst out into some version of gestures and sign language, it's because my voice runs out, which has never happened before but there's always a first time.

I would first like to give you a little bit of a perspective from the Intel standpoint, what the Internet has meant for Intel. And simply put, it is as big a change as Intel has ever seen.

Intel was founded to capitalize on the possibility of integrating large numbers of transistors on an integrated circuit. That has defined the first third of our existence so far.

An equally big change came around in the early '80s with the advent of the personal computer. That has defined our market and our characteristic as a company for the next 10, 15 years. And the Internet, from a business standpoint, from a product standpoint, from a strategy standpoint represents the environment that we are pursuing now.

And potentially, just kind of roughly speaking, it represents a tripling of the business opportunity that we see. So it's not very often that a company sees an opportunity that opens up to that extent.

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet. I just want to flash through a few pieces of data. I'm sure nothing I'm saying in this part is going to be new to any of you, but it's kind of interesting to look at a few pieces of data.

The number of users, 10x-fold increase in a few years' time. E-commerce, 10x-fold increase in a five-year period of time reaching numbers -- projected to reach numbers in the trillions of dollars, approaching, on a worldwide basis, the size of the U.S. economy. Information search, 10x magnitude in less than a year as measured by the traffic on one of the modern search engine companies', Google's, site.

Kind of a side element of that, thousandfold change in trademark filing in five years' time. Most of the 300,000 units of trademark filing have to do with Internet-related trademark filing today. I'll bet you wouldn't have known that one.

And, of course, something that we are all vitally aware of, the impact it had on the financial markets; particularly the NASDAQ that is heavy with Internet companies.

Leading on, I kind of date the beginning of the Internet as the IPO of Netscape. From a valuation standpoint, it would be public offering of Netscape, public offering of Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, VA Linux. Note the change in the slope that takes place, that is accelerating until stuff hits the fan. And after that, some negative.

(Laughter.)

ANDREW GROVE: I wish I had known what today is going to do because I would have completed the graph, but today's news is good.

But the interesting aspect of it is that what you're seeing, and why you look at the totality of that picture, is a steady acceleration in the rate of growth of NASDAQ. And even after the recent correction, when you take the value of the NASDAQ, it is a continuation of this trend line with the exception of the last period of time in which it enjoyed an excursion that departed upward from the trend line. So it had a tremendous effect on the financial market and tremendous effect on the companies that enjoy the benefit of this, as represented by feverish merger and acquisition activities, both in Internet content companies and Internet infrastructure companies.

My mission here today is to think about what does it take to continue the beneficial effects and to dodge the bad effects. And particularly, there is no single answer to all constituents. I want to concentrate on three groups of participants: governments, individuals, and businesses.

And the rule that I have been advocating for the government is kind of the Hippocratic oath applied to legislations. This is a very powerful phenomenon. First of all, do not do anything to derail it. So in that sense, government's action is as much about what the government doesn't do, avoids doing, as what the government does in a proactive, positive fashion.

And the significant pitfalls that the government has avoided implicitly following the Hippocratic oath is note is that there is no such a thing as a Department of the Internet, which I think would have been a terrible mistake because it would have taken a phenomenon that wants to become pervasive in all aspects of society and the economy and would have bottled it up under the jurisdiction of one organization. There is no Federal Internet Commission trying to guide the development and the evolution of the Internet. And there's no special tax associated with the Internet.

That is on the positive side. Now, if you ask the question of what personally I would like to see the government do, I would like some particular actions pursued. Some of it are, and some of them are barely being debated.

First and foremost, the Internet is a worldwide phenomenon. For its potential to play out correctly, trade barriers have to be dismantled. And engaging China in the worldwide trading organization -- in particular, establishing permanent normal trading relationship with China -- was a necessary step. I'm very gratified that at least we have cleared one hurdle over the last week along that line.

In a similar fashion, in a much more subtle and much more complicated fashion, we need to be on guard with the possible evolution and emergence of e-protectionism--to go with the trend of putting an "E" in front of everything--such as possibilities by some of the European market companies to begin to trade -- treat trading and commerce in electronic bits as service such that they can tax them at service rates which are substantially higher than product rates.

The principle that I look at here is to consider that commerce on the Internet is commerce by other means. Commerce in terms of bits is the same thing as commerce in terms of atoms, is equivalent to commerce in terms of atoms. Nothing more and nothing less.

It's very important for us to understand that the implements of infrastructure are high-performance computing equipment that is used and deployed in very large numbers, and the vestiges of the cold war in which these were looked at upon as munitions are not appropriate and not effective. Using techniques that were developed when every computer could be serialized and kept track of at a time when computers are being shipped by the hundreds of millions, high-performance computers are shipped by the hundreds of millions, not only doesn't work; it gives an illusion of an action in the absence of a real one.

I'm very encouraged by recent trends where the U.S. Defense Department, has gotten to realize this and realize that when it comes to mass-market high-performance computing, the best defense they have against being put at a competitive disadvantage is to use that technology early rather than trying to follow-up the use by other countries.

And lastly, but probably most importantly, from a domestic standpoint, it is extremely important for us to open up the barriers to the worldwide talent, high-tech talent, that wants to migrate where the work is, and right now the work is predominantly in the United States. I think we need to see a wholesale review of the philosophy of the innovation system in this country.

There are two sets of factions, two directions that require governmental help. One is in the trade area, and the second one is the technology, because these two pillars, trade and technology, have been behind the Internet boom and the boom in high technology and deployment of high technology and the corresponding benefit to productivity of the entire economy.

The second leg of this technology requires getting a little more serious about federal support of basic precompetitive research.

Our industry, the information technology industry, has a fairly successful history of competitors collaborating and universities on fundamental technologies. That collaboration is also the basis on which students get educated in the universities. Industry actually has a fairly good track record of collaborating with the universities, but industry alone cannot carry the load of basic research and information technology, which, on a secular basis, has been declining. And by no means is it commensurate with the importance of information technology that the latter has on the U.S. economy.

When it comes to taxation and privacy, I have a set of views that a good number of people in our industry don't share. I feel that the same way as atoms and bits should be treated in such a way that the bits should not be disadvantaged. I don't think bits deserve a comparative advantage versus physical commerce. Either -- And a way has to be found to achieve tax neutrality for commerce conducted on the medium of the Internet as compared to commerce conducted by physical means.

And secondarily, in privacy again, I'm somewhat in a minority position. Privacy issues involve the right of individuals and companies to data that characterize them. Those are variable assets. They are assets for which people pay money. They are assets are being traded. They are property, just like property made out of atoms. And in the history of humanity, law has developed to treat property rights, and I don't think property that's made out of electrons and bits should be and will ultimately be treated differently than property that's made out of atoms.

So government, like it or not, will have a legitimate right and obligation to form the rules with which that property and trading and ownership of that property is defined.

Lastly, the opposite part to the revision of immigration {?} is a very scary prospect that science and math education and the perception of science and math education, the perception of the importance of science and math education in this country, are in a pretty sorry state. And in an age that is defined by technology, not just information technology but technology of different kinds, that is a very scary prospect.

If a cure to this disease or this ill was implemented today, it would take 20 years before the effect of it would be felt. That cannot be shortened, but that should not be an excuse for vacillating and procrastinating in taking decisive action on that. And again, this is a place where governments at different level have to take leadership.

Switching to the second group, which is individual users of the Internet, the Internet has obvious benefits and the Internet is scary. And about the only way I can sum up my inclination is that -when something scary appears, one should embrace that which is the most scary.

And what is scary about it is -- taking a lot of liberties here -- never has so much information been available to so many for so little. And the cost of Internet access is, by any historical measure, minimal. It's less than cable TV for a totality of hardware and connection costs. The barriers to participation are extremely low. And those barriers are low in economic terms and every other term. And just give you a few examples.

The creator of Napster, which is a very rapidly evolving and phenomenon that we'll talk a few more words on later, is 19 years old. Age and educational requirements are not -- do not come in there. Ethnic barriers are not barriers here. Witness the rise and prominence of Jerry Yang. Economic barriers are eliminated. Just to illustrate that I know a real-life story of a garden service person who goes on the Internet in the Los Angeles public libraries to solicit business through a Web page of his without owning his own computer. And, of course, geographic barriers are demolished when software can be shipped around an electronic network.

It is a self-teaching medium. Elementary, rudimentary training is enough to get you started. The medium will guide you around and allow you to become more proficient in it. And the only thing that we need to be concerned with is access alone is meaningless. Education, as we talked about earlier, and cultural participation are the only barriers there are.

Altogether, the Internet is a barrier buster.

There has been no technological development that did not bring a dark side with it, and I don't think the Internet is going to be any different. I don't think any of the related or similar phenomena are going to be any different.

Recently, there has been a number of speeches and articles -- given and articles written indicating the threats of genomics and information technology being pervasive or being ever so powerful. And our survival and encounter and close brush with the Y2K problem indicates even today what a pervasive and thorough dependence we have on information technology in all aspects of daily life.

I don't know what the answer to that one is. I don't know -- I can't reassure you that all those threats are meaningless, that they are not real. But we can take some perverse satisfaction, perverse comfort from the fact that all of us in our adult lives grew up under the threat of a nuclear holocaust, and through the means of ethics and dialogue and pragmatic consideration, we have avoided being destroyed by it and even spawn some benefit; the Internet being a key element of that.

With that, let me move to the third set of constituents which is businesses. And here my desire would be for all of us to talk less, which is an ironic thing for a keynote speaker to say, and do more.

And just to illustrate what I mean by this, this has really been one of the greatest period of legal wealth creations since the Renaissance, and I don't even know how to dollar adjust wealth creation during the Renaissance. But those of us in the field, or some of us in the field, have an uncomfortable feeling that the wealth creation is not accompanied by a corresponding creation of real value.

We need to go back to basics. We need to realize that a feature of a software product is not a software product. A feature of a service is not a service. It is a little bit like if today's mentality was applied to the personal computing software instead of supplying you with a word processing piece of software you would buy from a company -- you would buy a feature from texteditor.com and another one from spellcheck.com and another one from merge.com, another one from fun.com, and you would be left with the task of assembling a word processor out of that.

That is kind of the shape of the Internet services and Internet infrastructure today. And this is going to be ultimately self-limiting because users need and demand, really, particularly as they become a little more fed up with assembling word processors out of features, they're looking for complete benefits and not features, and they will rebel at those features, particularly when a lot of those features are self-serving from the company's standpoint. They represent a potential way for the company to make a presence, and they do not solve real business problems.

But a question that I would love every company who wants to participate in Internet space to ask: Are we providing a complete benefit or are we providing a small feature? And are we solving a well-defined business problem with our product?

So let me sum up. Three sets of recommendations or pleas that I would like to leave you with. For governments, do no harm, first and foremost. Individuals, embrace that which confounds you most. And for businesses, do more and talk less.

Realizing that these things take place in a fantastic, all powerful period of democratization of information access through the means of a pervasive, very low-cost technology. That technology lowers barriers. Through lowered barriers comes the participation of people who have not been participating and didn't think of participating in that world.

But like any democracy, it provides messy and unpredictable and difficult-to-control consequences. And an example of that is, as I mentioned earlier, Napster. By Napster, I don't just mean Napster as a company or as a technology alone, but all of its cousins and descendants, which seem to multiply kind of one every two weeks.

All of these, on the one hand, make information available at no cost to a lot of people. And the messy part is the information they make available to a lot of people is somebody else's intellectual property.

So the consequences of this barrier-busting democratization is either good or bad depending on which side of the ox that is being gored you stand.

But eventual success and eventual resolution of the dilemmas shaped, created by this democratization process, messy as it is, as in all democracy, requires participation and debate. Positive and good natured but realistic debate on all of these factors.

And just in passing, I couldn't end on a better phrase than one from the community created from the Open Source software efforts which has evolved through the cooperation of a number of people. And I think it is a very apt guiding principle to phrase your problems, whether you are in government, whether you are looking at your own actions or whether you're dealing with corporations on that.

As it says there: "We don't believe in kings and presidents. We believe in rough consensus and running code." And that's what it's going to take to make the democracy work for us.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

DEAN CLARK {?}: I'd like to congratulate you on finishing your talk. Your voice sounded great.

ANDREW GROVE: But I may not be able to answer any questions.

(Laughter.)

DEAN CLARK: I realized when you said that that you could conveniently lose your voice when I asked you a question, but that's okay.

I'd like to start and use the same flow that you used in the talk and ask you a question related to government.

In your talk, you talked about the role that governments might play. You also mentioned individuals and businesses. There's a sector of society and a set of institutions that are quite near and dear to our hearts, and that is non-profits.

The question is: Do you see a role --

ANDREW GROVE: Harvard is a non-profit?

DEAN CLARK: Harvard is definitely --

(Laughter.)

(Applause.)

DEAN CLARK: Yes.

(Laughter.)

DEAN CLARK: I could definitely confirm that Harvard is a non-profit.

The question is what role do you see, if any, for non-profit organizations in -- not just in taking advantage of the technology but in actually shaping and influencing the development of the Internet and its impact on society?

ANDREW GROVE: Well, setting aside non-profits with multi-billion dollar endowments --

(Laughter.)

(Applause.)

ANDREW GROVE: -- the role I see for non-profits, not educational non-profits particularly but the other types, is to lubricate the availability of societal benefits to those who are on the wrong side of the poverty curve or access curve or barriers.

So as an example, I mentioned the lot of Los Angeles public library providing access to the lawn mower guy in L.A. is a perfectly appropriate role. And that library was probably equipped with a computer through the work of some non-profit organization.

So in this context of what we're talking about, it doesn't just apply to the context we're talking about. It applies to all kinds of goods and services. Non-profits should look after getting into the crevices of society the benefits of that which the more fortunate of us have available to us.

DEAN CLARK: Very interesting. How would you interpret the role of the Open Software Foundation in that context?

ANDREW GROVE: I don't look -- It may be a non-profit organization, but I look at that as a voluntary cooperative of technical people to further technology. And it doesn't fit the mold and role of non-profits as we've described for --

DEAN CLARK: A traditional non-profit.

ANDREW GROVE: Correct.

DEAN CLARK: Okay. Moving along, I'd like to ask you to come back to one of the questions that you raised yourself and simply come back to the question of individual behavior.

What advice would you give to a college sophomore who came to you about to start some Internet company and was thinking of dropping out of school?

ANDREW GROVE: I would tell him not to.

DEAN CLARK: I don't think they heard you.

ANDREW GROVE: I said I would tell him not to. Much as there are notable examples of some college dropouts that have made good --

(Laughter.)

ANDREW GROVE: -- to be outweighed by millions of people who acquire, in their young years, an education that lasts them a lifetime.

So to me, that's an opportunistic short-term move that, barring special circumstances, a special luck, won't work for most people, won't work long term for most people.

DEAN CLARK: Okay. Would you give the same advice to -- I'll make it a little more closer to home. Would you give the same advice to a first-year Harvard Business School student?

ANDREW GROVE: Yes.

DEAN CLARK: Thank you.

(Laughter.)

DEAN CLARK: Good. I like the answers.

ANDREW GROVE: The question is whether I would give the advice to an Intel employee who wants to quit to go to Harvard Business School.

(Laughter.)

DEAN CLARK: Yes, I understand. I understand the dilemma that poses.

(Laughter.)

(Applause.)

DEAN CLARK: You mentioned Napster and intellectual property. As you mentioned, there are lots of cousins and relatives, including some that are even harder to monitor, harder to detect.

ANDREW GROVE: Harder to control.

DEAN CLARK: Harder to control.

ANDREW GROVE: Harder to take out of existence.

DEAN CLARK: Yeah. How do you see this playing out? You talked about, you know, the open -- the software quote about rough code and dialogue and so forth, but is it possible there might not be a solution with that kind of technology to this dilemma?

ANDREW GROVE: Suppressing it will not work. So if I was the owner of intellectual property that is being threatened by it, I would kind of write on a big sheet of paper and put it on -- I don't think any owner of that kind of intellectual property lives in cubicles, but on the side of my office that suppressing it won't work. And then I would go and try to figure out how can I lower the barrier to allow most people the chance to be honest.

A very cynical view, but the devil probably would describe us all saying we all have a price. And if the cost of ripping somebody off is 5X, I may not do it. If it's X - I would do that. I would look for that X at which point I can offer a benefit at a reasonable cost and change the business model by which I operate.

You probably know my phrase strategic inflection point.

DEAN CLARK: Yes.

ANDREW GROVE: This is the mother of all strategic inflection point for content ownership. And you cannot defer and deny an inflection point that comes with a 10X force behind it. You just have to make a change ahead of you getting weakened. And there's still time for that. And that's kind of easy for me to say because it's not my problem, but I really don't think any approach or any strategy that is based on suppressing what cannot be suppressed will work.

DEAN CLARK: Okay. Moving to business, a couple of questions. First, you mentioned the idea that a feature is not a product and a feature is not a company. One idea that has been circulating around is that what we're seeing in the creation of all these new companies that are essentially built around a feature or an element of larger service is that what these are are essentially an externalized version of kind of business model or technology R & D where each of these firms are essentially an R & D effort funded by venture capital replacing what used to happen inside companies. And what you're seeing is essentially a market-based version of a lot of really clever people looking to create that new feature, that thing, taking it through the market really for the purpose of being acquired by eventually somebody who is going to pull it all together to create the actual product.

What's your sense of that?

ANDREW GROVE: The first part is probably right. You can look at the companies as venture -- as R & D funded by investors' money. But my experience through decades of running various high-tech activities is that the big -- most difficult part of an in-house R & D effort is harvesting a dollar's benefit on a dollar's effort. And apart from a dollar on a dollar, we're lucky to get 30 cents' worth of benefit out of a dollar, because the other 70 cents are going to get lost in a given company under a given management within the four walls of the company taking the benefits of that R & D, moving it into the manufacturing, integrate it with a lot of products that are taken to marketplace.

So the theory that all these features are R & D is kind of like, if you wish, something modernly equivalent to Xerox PARC. Let's invent a bunch of things and let's see what happens. And unless you put the tracks of deployment and utilization in place, nothing much happens. Somebody else may use it, somebody else may not use it, and you won't even get your 30 cents on a dollar.

I don't think it has been particularly effective in getting in a useful form in the marketplace. It's been very effective in generating new ideas and the new feature form, but that integration process is --

DEAN CLARK: So there's an incompletion --

ANDREW GROVE: Correct.

DEAN CLARK: -- in the process. Possibly another opportunity.

ANDREW GROVE: Yeah. There is a need there, and maybe the way this is going to be solved is that companies are going to be formed to harvest these features and specialize in putting them together into latter day word processors.

DEAN CLARK: Let me turn and ask you a question about Intel. You mentioned that the Internet is probably the largest, certainly the most significant, development; in your language, an inflection point strategically for Intel.

ANDREW GROVE: Not the largest ever.

DEAN CLARK: Not the largest but the most --

ANDREW GROVE: Largest in the last 15 years.

DEAN CLARK: Last 15 years. You've gone through a couple of them, the company, and you're certainly going through one now. What is it like inside the company? What is it actually doing to the inside of Intel? And how is it shaping and changing things from -- you know, viewed from, really, inside?

ANDREW GROVE: It's going to be a somewhat laborious answer, but to describe it, I have to contrast it with the other one that you refer to.

DEAN CLARK: Good.

ANDREW GROVE: And for those of you that are not familiar with Intel's history, Intel started as a memory chip producer. In the mid '80s we basically got beaten out of that market by the Japanese producers of semiconductor memory chips.

What we did is we shut down -- got out of the memory business, shut down that activity, and moved all of our resources into microprocessors in the personal computing, and that has given us a new lease on life and a very successful one.

What we are going through now is equally important and equally profound, but it's very different because we're not going away from anything, because the same Internet that gives us these new opportunities and the mandate to move into new fields also lifts the personal computer business to new heights and new growth, growth that we haven't seen in ten years' time.

So the challenge that we have is we have to broaden our presence. When our core business is vital and profitable and very vigorous, and we need every pair of hands and every brain to extend our participation in the core business, at the same time we have a once-in-a- life opportunity to get ourselves positioned in communication chips and communication services and the like. So we have to do two things at the same time instead of going away from one thing to the other.

So the long wind-up gets us to an answer, it stretches us very, very thin into a variety of areas. And it's very tense, very busy, very haphazard. It's kind of like a startup, a startup running --

DEAN CLARK: A little larger scale.

ANDREW GROVE: Yeah.

DEAN CLARK: Just one follow-up question to that and then I think we might want to turn to the audience to see if anyone has any questions for you.

The question really is about wireless. It's obviously part of this whole development, but it seems to have some special character to it because it creates new avenues for new kinds of players to come in and compete really directly with PCs in many ways and add sort of new alternatives and new things that people haven't been able to do before.

How are you -- How do you see that developing for Intel? And how do you plan to participate in the wireless revolution?

ANDREW GROVE: Two comments on that one. First of all, I disagree with the statement that it's a substitute for personal computing. It's a complement to personal computer, witnessing on the way over here in the car I checked my e-mail on a wireless device.

DEAN CLARK: Right.

ANDREW GROVE: That is an auxiliary access to the e-mail system that we have in the corporation that deposits my e-mail messages on the personal computer. It complements and extends my use of the personal computer, network personal computer, to your car.

And another data point is Japan has seen probably the most rapid rise through DoCoMo of Internet access through cell phones. And almost to the month, you can track the rise in personal computer consumption in Japan with the rise of DoCoMo personal computer services.

Any of these devices gets you inside the user community, and when you're inside the user community, you're likely to access the network in a multiplicity of ways. So we see it as a complement.

DEAN CLARK: As a complement, yeah.

ANDREW GROVE: And the second part of the question, we also see it as a very large opportunity for intelligent silicon including memories, much of the memories, nonvolatile memories, in cell phones, are Intel Flash. And we see it as an opportunity for our low power microprocessor that's called StrongARM. And we acquired one of the companies, in the process of stretching ourselves thinner and thinner, that is developing control chipsets for digital signal processing.

So we see it as a silicon opportunity and a complement of core business.

DEAN CLARK: Interesting. Should we turn it over to anybody who might have a question?

ANDREW GROVE: Sure.

DEAN CLARK: Couple of minutes.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Dr. Grove.

Dr. Grove, is the government following your hippocratic oath advice?

ANDREW GROVE: Would you do me a favor and introduce yourself?

AUDIENCE: Yes. My name is Gary Beach. I am publisher of CIO Magazine. I'm a technology commentator for NPR.

And the question: Is the government following your hippocratic oath advice in the Microsoft case?

ANDREW GROVE: If you don't mind, I will resist a very, very clever circular way of trying to get my opinion on the Microsoft case on the record.

(Laughter.)

(Applause.)

DEAN CLARK: A question over here.

AUDIENCE: Hi; I'm a sophomore at the college. I have a question for Dr. Grove.

I agree with your point about creating wealth as opposed -- as creating value on the Internet as opposed to creating wealth. And then I figured you would say something about the dot-coms as I'm a sophomore in college, somebody thinking about starting a dot-com, probably shouldn't.

But then you had the quote on the board that said, "Talk less and do more." And --

ANDREW GROVE: I'm sorry; I had the what?

AUDIENCE: The quote that was on the screen that said, "Talk less and do more."

ANDREW GROVE: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: And I guess that goes to the point of academia, then. I'm a little bit suspicious of it because at the college you can probably say undergrads don't get a whole lot of instruction in that kind of thing, and one could say -- or at least I would say that it would be more important to get out there and get your hands dirty and actually have some real experience in starting a dot-com. Even though you might not succeed, it would probably be a better opportunity to learn something practical if you wanted to go into business, if you wanted to learn about the Internet.

ANDREW GROVE: Let me ask you something before I answer. If you didn't have a number of people making incredible wealth, at least on paper, in front of you, would you be equally tempted?

AUDIENCE: No, I probably would be.

(Laughter.)

AUDIENCE: I probably would be, but that would be more of a self-confidence thing rather than I want to make a million dollars, I want to make a billion dollars.

ANDREW GROVE: If you would be equally tempted by the technology, I would say go for it. And you don't have to be honest with all of us, but you have to be honest with yourself.

(Laughter.)

(Applause.).

ANDREW GROVE: If chasing after the equity appreciation is a significant factor, I think you're going to shortcut; do yourself a long-term harm.

DEAN CLARK: Got one more question over here.

AUDIENCE: Well, I'm at the jinxed microphone here. Paul Kantor from Rutgers.

I was hoping to get some reaction from you about this much trumpeted RISC chip development, the Crusoe {?}, which seems to aim at a large, gigantic, portable market.

ANDREW GROVE: You know, I don't know that much about that particular chip, and if I did, I probably wouldn't be commenting about it in detail anyway. But the fact of the matter is that the microprocessor market segment of the information technology business is and has been for a long time an extremely lucrative, high volume, high intellectual property segment that has resisted commoditization for a long time. It is lifted in terms of volume users by the Internet as we talked about earlier, and it's always had a large number of people trying to compete in it. And some people try to compete by imitating the leader, and some try to use some new concepts.

And that is what keeps us on our toes. And whether -- if, in fact, Transmeta's efforts are powerful and successful, I think we're going to be a better producer of low-power microprocessors as a result.

DEAN CLARK: Well, on behalf of all of us, we want to thank you for coming. It's fantastic. Thank you.

(Applause.)

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